This piece was created for the last show of Season 19 of Tuesday Night Cafe, as part of a set called “they/them femmes & friends,” featuring Kyla, Mya, Navor, Opulence, and me!

Our show bio: “they/them femmes & friends is a collaboration of trans+intersex artists of color who use they/them pronouns. Though we share pronouns, our genders are as diverse as our spirits, and we’re excited to share a glimpse with you tonight. This set also features a slideshow* of gender affirming photos, art, and selfies by people who use they/them pronouns.”

* I didn’t get permission to share the photo slideshow beyond the Tuesday Night Cafe space, but will ask for it at some undetermined point in the future. Seeing the beautiful joy of comrades projected into a community space that feels like home to me felt like the spiritual healing that comes with truly being seen.

Thank you to Navor for allowing me to share this (cropped) image below. Please contact Navor for the full-size image and do not use or share without permission.

“Lotus Flows Above, Let Us Float Above” [Image description: Three lotuses sit on lily pads as they float on reflections of worlds that carry them with leaves surrounding their existence and two brown hands stretching towards the direction of prayers and calls for peace. Gradient colors of pink, purple, orange, green, black and white are present in this healing formed by hands.]

MyaMy gender feels like an uncomfortable silence.

Audreymy gender feels like
something too visible and unseen all at once

Opulence
my gender feels like a cloud before the storm

Navor
my gender feels like
a brown nonbinary babe wearing a velvet dress and their mothers top

Kyla
my gender feels like queer futurity

Mya
My gender feels like an uncomfortable silence.

In Japanese animation there are frequently pauses,
without dialogue or music,
that make American audiences…uncomfortable.

Studio Ghibli movies,
when dubbed,
have their silences erased, replaced by sound effects
or conversation
or explanation

They say,silence makes us uncomfortable …

Audrey
my gender feels like
something too visible and unseen all at once

wading through an ocean of she sir, sir, this is the women’s room

what can I get for you ladies brothers and sisters ladies and gentlemen i am in the liminal nowhere in between

feels like target in the bathroom
feels like holding it in
deciding not to drink water
— even though I love drinking water

Opulence
my gender feels like a cloud before the storm;
an acorn collected, carried, buried, and forgotten.

An emerald held in the earth; a bird in a storm.

My gender feels like a clump of hair,
a satisfying sneeze.

My gender is a grain of mucus covered sand on its way to becoming a pearl
my gender is a ruby, a yellow hued sapphire, a mistake in a chemical composition

Navor
my gender feels like
a brown nonbinary babe wearing a velvet dress and their mothers top
reminiscent of baro’t saya

they, them, theirs sit so gracefully on a wooden stool asking themselves if their moms looked like this, if their fathers approved of this, if past lovers who hovered wanted this, if strangers were ever asked to change their name to sound more like them [1] – to be read more like them [1] – if i’ve become more like them [1] // because they want to survive like their indigenous-native and ilokano-pangasinan ancestors but not adopt the ways that have erased a type of healing nor assimilate into a settler-colonial practice. // as they end their gaze, they blink with promise to always ever resist because….. i have always wanted this. Footnotes: [1] them (T͟Hem,T͟Həm/) – Spaniards & Amerikkkans, cis-white-hetero-ablebodied-men

Kyla
my gender feels like queer futurity,
a term coined by José Esteban Muñoz.
in his words and theory,
“we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”
in my own words that means
my gender feels like holding a future within me
that doesn’t yet exist
my gender feels like a work in progress
hands with chipped pink nail polish
shaping earth,
planting seeds
for a future
where my gender
can flourish.

Audrey
like I have only ever been trying on things that don’t fit
no, I don’t want to be a boy
and I have never been your daughter
though I have always been your daughter

and it still moves me to call myself,
in a secret, quiet voice,
a queer woman of color

it still moves me to think of
the women ancestors
who could hardly imagine me, girlchild, living with so much freedom

Mya
When they ask me, what is your gender?
I say that I’m
transgender,
nonbinary,
& agender (that means without gender)

that we each make our own definition of the word,
that I never understood that internal sense of gender so many of us are supposed to have
that I grew up…
uncomfortable

Opulencemy gender feels like hot lava regurgitated by the earth; held down and pressed into something beautiful

Audrey
feels like getting to a comrade’s home after a long day
and taking off my chest binder
nipples out, still they

Kyla
feels like a childhood spent yearning for the gentle flame of a candle
my gender feels like a chrysalis ready to burst free

Opulence
my gender is uncontainable, hot and fluid. my gender is a whisper and a scream
the tattoo I don’t remember getting.

Kyla
my gender feels like warmth–warm hugs, warm sweaters, warm faces

my gender feels like floating in a tide of clear water, not knowing where it will take me next

Navor
my gender feels like abolition not reform
feels like more than one LGBTQIA+ themed night during the year

Audrey
feels like fuck an “LGBTQ” org
that can’t bother to use my pronouns correctly

Opulence
my gender is a gift to my ancestors, a silent thank you I see from the other side of the closet door
my gender holds space, opens hearts makes room.

Audrey
feels like no more questions about
whether being trans is a choice
which bathroom
which danger

Navor
feels like recognition that mental health deserves more than one day
how suicide prevention is not out of the darkness
but out of the whiteness
because lightness has done nothing for brown and black femmes

I have three different drafts of blog posts about different things, many of them heavy, and because I haven’t written a blog post for so long, I feel the need to write about everything, and to do it well, and instead I have spent large chunks of the last few days scowling and/or frowning at my laptop with WordPress open. So instead of a full blog post, here is a random list of thoughts:

I talked to my parents about Vincent Chin for the first time today, and until then I never realized they’d never brought him up before. I asked my dad if he was scared at the time, and he replied simply, “There were just some places we knew not to go.” He mentioned being on a business trip with a black co-worker in the South a while back, and he remembers that co-worker telling him how nervous he got when he got lost on the way to a presentation. “You just couldn’t be sure, so you knew not to go some places.”

We talked a lot about happiness and what that looks like, and values and work ethic and what it meant to grow up in the community we did. I asked my mother what lessons she hoped she imparted on her children, and she started to answer, then asked, “Isn’t this kind of cheating? Shouldn’t you know?” In a way, it does feel like cheating, as a writer — why bother with metaphors and signs and allegories and trying to figure out the subtext, I’ll just ask her.

The Poets for Ferguson cypher was amazing, and powerful, and so heavy. I talked to my friend Ami about it today, and we are both working our way through the hours we didn’t see live. I feel an absence, almost, now that it has wrapped up, and I realize how much I crave space that is centered on and exclusively for people of color.

I am grateful to have a friend I can Skype with for three hours about everything we are thinking and fears and feeling stuck and not being sure what lessons our parents wanted to teach us and what we should be doing next.

I am thinking a lot about inertia in general, and about living up to one of the poems I performed — one of its conclusions is that the road to progress is long, but that it’s important to keep moving. So often over this past month and a half (and in other stretches before), I have wondered how we are supposed to keep moving forward, and whether we will be able to. And I keep reminding myself to balance the need for self-care against the knowledge that my ability to turn away — and the instinct to do so — both of these are rooted in privilege.

Today was my mother’s birthday. Her 33-year-anniversary with my father is coming up soon. They went to get Thai food to celebrate. This morning on the phone, my mother misheard me say I would call her back and thought I’d said I’d be at the house at noon. “My heart jumped for a second,” she told me in disappointment.

I have been sitting on a post about “The Giving Tree” and motherhood, and I wanted to talk to my mom about it first. She said she doesn’t find it sad, just accurate. I texted my brother about it later, as he got ready to head to the Thai restaurant to surprise my mother.
(does the boy come back? / As an old man he returns and sits on her stump / oh, happy book then!)

What is a sad story about motherhood, then? Is it a tree that keeps waiting, having given away all of its fruit to show how deeply and unconditionally she loves? Will she continue to wait, forever, unable to move past the spot of her last and most painful sacrifice? How can we ever begin to heal the wounds of boys who never return and trees who will always be kept waiting?

Goodbye, National Poetry Month! See you in another 333 days. This piece is from April 2.

at the chopping block
slicing brussels sprouts
i think about how roasting vegetables brings out their sweetness
and then about the high heat needed to forge steel

the crucible makes us sweeter, stronger,
more alive

always searching for that next line of poetry,
i think of myself
and what fires i have passed through

and i don’t regret them, of course,
but i remind myself not to glamorize them, either
the pain was real,
fresh and sharp like the nick in my thumb from the paring knife
full of heat, like the skin at the top of my knuckle
holding the memory of a recent burn

burns renew themselves this way
heat seeking heat like a body returning home to itself
when you run your hands under hot water, you remember
the hurt sprung forth from your own carelessness

a dear friend once wrote
do not destroy yourself for poetry
a much needed reminder
that being broken may lead us to art

but there is no need for us to seek out the breaking
(there is enough, always
coming our way)
it is enough for us to seek the sweetness
and to carry that taste, on the tip of our tongue
savoring this memory
for the heat that we know will come

said the lighthouse keeper to the walrus:
your skin is slicker than mine
the waves roll over you like caresses,
bathing you in salt and brine,
but never breaching through
seeping into pores

when I swim the ocean she changes me
pulls the liquid in me out through my skin
we call it osmosis, with our scientists’ tongues
our cells seek balance
and they send forth an offering of water
desperately seeking salinity

the ocean changes me, walrus
though she is vast
leagues and leagues stretching beyond
my fragile skinbag of bones
yet I seek to offer this tiny drink of water
to become a part, a piece

I want to become the ocean

do you know, my dear tusked friend
at night when you doze upon the rock
I lay awake on my boat bed
hard as the planks of my shorebound ship

dreaming of the days when she tossed me in her arms
when I rode her waves to their crescendos
enveloped, caressed, held
as she rocked me into slumber

now
keeping vigil at my table
or stalking the deck of my tower
my beam of light beckoning her other ships away
to shore

I know I am betraying her
calling other men to land, to stand on firm ground

and my heart aches inside its cage
yearning toward open water
I am a traitor
I have betrayed my lover

but some nights,
dear walrus,
on some of these nights alone
as she beats herself against my home

I feel her running down my face
and taste her salt on my lips
and remember
the ocean lives within me
I will never be alone

I seem to have taken to only posting before poetry shows now, since I know that organizers and event pages will be linking to my blog. I haven’t been writing a ton recently, but I do have a few poems up at well-adjusted queer kids. Also, you can see Syd’s comics, which are excellent.

Speaking of Syd, they also linked me to this article about blaming the revision process on Modernists, which I just skimmed. It is actually helping with my pre-show nerves. (As I’ve mentioned, thinking about performing makes me freakout.)

I’ve been meaning to write a post about metadata and poetry (i.e. that tagging poetry on social media allows poets to create an additional layer of meaning, relating that to poets who translate their own texts, but also all writing is a translation of personal experience, and also all reading is filtered through subjective experience, can you see how this would be a long blog post and also how this parenthetical kind of works like a tag?), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

What first got Sullivan thinking about revision was encountering a version of Ernest Hemingway she’d never seen before. While a first-year PhD student at Harvard, Sullivan visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and its Hemingway collection. She marveled at the famous author’s archive—his letters, his family scrapbooks, even his bullfighting materials. But one thing in particular stood out to her: the typescript of his novel “The Sun Also Rises.” It showed Hemingway changing his book dramatically from one version to the next. Monologues vanished, entire plot points disappeared, and, in the end, he arrived at the terse, mysterious novel that became part of the American literary canon. “The Hemingway style that’s so familiar to us wasn’t in the first draft,” Sullivan says. “It was a product of revision.”

Hemingway’s method reminded Sullivan of the way T.S. Eliot had trimmed down “The Waste Land” from pages and pages of manuscript to the final, elliptical 434-line poem. She realized that these authors shared a profound commitment to the power of revision, and that this commitment was itself worth studying. While plenty of literary scholars had examined the way individual authors edited their own works, they rarely compared their findings between authors, or from one period to the next. By making these comparisons, Sullivan identified the Modernists as the first to practice our contemporary form of revision. She also learned how revision contributed to their distinct literary technique. “We often assume that style comes out of nowhere,” she says. “But style is produced in revision, and revision is not something writers do naturally.”

tl;dr: Revision is unnatural to writers, but it’s how they produce style.

How this relates: I’ve been revising the piece “23” (read: thinking about this poem and wanting to change it) for quite some time, and I finally cut a bunch out and am going to read a much shorter poem tonight. It still doesn’t feel done, but art is a process.

I’m performing at UCLA for the first time tomorrow. I started writing poetry just after graduating. (More specifically, I wrote and performed one piece once in the summer of 2008, then didn’t do any other poetry things for almost two years. And then I wrote some more poems.) It’ll also be the first time I’ve gotten to attend a TN on Tour. I love the idea that we can bring the specific community magic of Tuesday Night Project into college campuses, and obviously, there is so much symbolism because it’ll be at UCLA, and I used to go to there. We also have a sweet lineup. Are you around tomorrow night? You should swing by Sunset Village.

Thanks to the Asian Pacific Coalition for inviting us. The theme, loosely, is “sisterhood.” The only piece I’ve chosen to read so far is one I wrote during National Poetry Month for a friend from the Daily Bruin.

Edit: I was about to hit publish, and I just remembered that I performed “native tongue” during the workshop I facilitated during the ITASA West Coast Conference in April. Still. Symbolism.

and the lawn is trampled now
the hunting doctors having reached with gloved hands
into each corner and quiet dark place
searching out every last prize

will this metaphor hold?
i think it has been two days now
tomorrow will you rise again
your body wrapped in white
reborn

will you shake off all the shadows
clothe yourself in newness
laugh with voice of golden honey
gently brush your hand against my cheek
tell me i was silly to worry
that you knew all along this was just a test
your eyes, holding sadness overcome,
will remember you had felt forsaken

but even your scars
will have faded
will be white and new
jagged holes filled in
the covered gaps a metaphor nested in metaphor
of a tomb filled, sealed, emptied, sealed over again